A few days ago, my friend Cosmin Costinas sent me a paragraph on Facebook and asked me “guess who wrote this?”, probably because I recently gave myself the task of translating a rather exotic passage by two virologists – Dr. Kwok-Yung Yuen and Dr. David Lung from Hong Kong University (Dr. Yuen is a leading virologist, often referred to as the Hong Kong Zhong Nanshan, or the Hong Kong Christian Drosten, depending on whom you are familiar with). They wrote a text for the influential newspaper Ming Pao, in which they claim: "The real source of this viral poison [the coronavirus] are the degenerate customs and inferior root stock of the Chinese people.”[1]
The paragraph went as follows:
For example, the initial fulcrum of the current epidemic is very probably to be found in the markets of Wuhan province. Chinese markets are known for their dangerous dirtiness, and for their irrepressible taste for the open-air sale of all kinds of living animals, stacked on top of one another. Whence the fact that at a certain moment the virus found itself present, in an animal form itself inherited from bats, in a very dense popular milieu, and in conditions of rudimentary hygiene.[2]
